On Tuesday, Delhi Education Minister Atishi claimed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) would arrest her in a month if she refused to join the BJP. The AAP’s leader former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and former minister Satyendra Jain are in jail besides Kejriwal in the Delhi excise scam case while its Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh received bail on Tuesday after six months.

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Atishi feared fellow minister Sourabh Bhardwaj, MLA Durgesh Pathak and Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadda too could be put behind bars. Though the BJP leaders refuted Atishi’s charge, the fact is the AAP has become the BJP's main target after Kejriwal’s party fielded candidates against the saffron party in the Gujarat assembly polls and later joined the I.N.D.I.A. alliance of the Opposition.

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Atishi said the BJP had approached her to join the party to "save my political career".

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"The prime minister and BJP have made up their minds that they want to crush the Aam Aadmi Party and all its leaders," she said, speaking at a press conference in New Delhi.

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Though the BJP quickly refuted Atishi's charges, the ball is in their court with questions arising about the ruling party's intentions.

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It is unclear whether the moves are a sign of nervousness, with the BJP unsure of repeating its performance in Delhi in the last two Lok Sabha polls, or a message to its political rivals that they too would face the same fate if they failed to fall in line.

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The government agencies had acted in a similar way against BJP rivals Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) and the NCP (Sharad Pawar) in Maharashtra, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and RJD leaders in Bihar but did not touch the Janata Dal (U) leaders when the Nitish Kumar-led party was in the Opposition.

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Atishi further said while the BJP was determined to break the AAP's unity, its moves would not succeed. “Yesterday the ED took Sourabh Bharadwaj and my name in the court, on the basis of a statement which has been with ED and CBI for one and a half years, this statement is in the chargesheet of ED. This statement is also in the chargesheets of CBI, so what was the reason for raising this statement now?

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“The reason is that now the BJP feels that despite Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and Satyendra Jain being in jail, the Aam Aadmi Party is still united and strong. Now they are planning to put the next line of our leadership in jail."

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